The Internet of Everything through IPv6: An Analysis of...

The Internet of Everything through IPv6:An Analysis of Challenges, Solutions and Opportunities

Antonio J. Jara1∗, Latif Ladid2, and Antonio Skarmeta3

1 Vice-chair, IEEE ComSoc IoT ETCUniversity of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO)

Sierre, Vallais, [email protected]

2 Chair, IEEE ComSoc IoT ETCIPv6 Forum and University of Luxembourg

[email protected]

3 Vice-chair, IEEE ComSoc IoT ETCUniversity of Murcia

Murcia, [email protected]

Abstract

The public IPv4 address space managed by IANA (http://www.iana.org) has been completely de-pleted by Feb 1st, 2011. This creates by itself an interesting challenge when adding new things andenabling new services on the Internet. Without public IP addresses, the Internet of Things capabilitieswould be greatly reduced. Most discussions about IoT have been based on the illusionary assumptionthat the IP address space is an unlimited resource or it is even taken for granted that IP is like oxy-gen produced for free by nature. Hopefully, the next generation of Internet Protocol, also known asIPv6 brings a solution. In early 90s, IPv6 was designed by the IETF IPng (Next Generation) WorkingGroup and promoted by the same experts within the IPv6 Forum since 1999. Expanding the IPv4 pro-tocol suite with larger address space and defining new capabilities restoring end to end connectivity,and end to end services, several IETF working groups have worked on many deployment scenarioswith transition models to interact with IPv4 infrastructure and services. They have also enhanced acombination of features that were not tightly designed or scalable in IPv4 like IP mobility, ad hoc ser-vices; etc catering for the extreme scenario where IP becomes a commodity service enabling lowestcost networking deployment of large scale sensor networks, RFID, IP in the car, to any imaginablescenario where networking adds value to commodity. For that reason, IPv6 makes feasible the newconception of extending Internet to Everything. IPv6 spreads the addressing space in order to sup-port all the emerging Internet-enabled devices. In addition, IPv6 has been designed to provide securecommunications to users and mobility for all devices attached to the user; thereby users can alwaysbe connected. This work provides an overview of our experiences addressing the challenges in termsof connectivity, reliability, security and mobility of the Internet of Things through IPv6 in order toreach the Internet of Everything. This describes the key challenges, how they have been solved withIPv6, and finally presents the future works and vision that describe the roadmap of the Internet ofEverything in order to reach an interoperable, trustable, mobile, distributed, valuable, and powerfulenabler for emerging applications such as Smarter Cities, Human Dynamics, Cyber-Physical Sys-tems, Smart Grid, Green Networks, Intelligent Transport Systems, and ubiquitous healthcare.

Keywords: IPv6, Internet of Things (IoT), Internet of Everything, M2M, 6LoWPAN.

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications, volume: 4, number: 3, pp. 97-118∗Corresponding author: Tel: +34868888771, Fax: +34868884151

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The Internet of Everything through IPv6 A.J. Jara, L. Ladid and A. Skarmeta

1 Introduction

The number of things that are connected to the Internet is growing exponentially. This has led to defininga new conception of Internet, the commonly called Internet of Things.

Internet of Things ecosystems are composed, on the one hand, of so called smart objects, i.e., tiny andhighly constrained physical devices in terms of memory capacity, computation capability, energy auton-omy, and communication capabilities. On the other hand, Internet of Things is made up of identificationtags and codes that allow identifying a specific thing in a unique and global way.

Several technologies are enabling these types of things.First, dealing with smart objects we can find technologies such as 6LoWPAN for Wireless Sensor

Networks (IEEE 802.15.4), Bluetooth Low Energy (IEEE 802.15.1) for Wireless Personal Area Net-works, WiFi Low Power (IEEE 802.11) for Wireless Local Area Networks, and finally Long Term Evo-lution – Advanced (LTE-A) for machine to machine communications in Wide Area Networks.

Second, for the identification of things the most extended technologies are barcode for the simpleidentification of a resource (e.g., product identifier), Quick Response (QR) or matrix barcodes for theextended identification of a resource (e.g., plain text and Universal Resource Locators (URLs)), RadioFrequency Identification (RFID) for the digital identification of resources with capabilities for multipleresource identification, identification out of line of sight, and extended identification capability. Finally,Near Field Communication (NFC) for the digital identification of resources through personal devicessuch as smart phones, and the establishment of peer-to-peer (P2P) communications.

Finally, other existing Internet technologies and devices such as smart phones, tablets, laptops, in-dustrial technologies, appliances, and building automation are also considered part of the Internet ofThings.

This new conception of extending Internet to everything is feasible thanks to the new version ofthe Internet Protocol (IPv6). IPv6 spreads the addressing space in order to support all the emergingInternet-enabled devices.

IPv6 has been designed to provide secure communications to users and mobility for all devicesattached to the user; thereby users can always be connected.

IPv6 features are what have made it possible to think about connecting all the objects and to buildthe Internet of Things.

The objective of the Internet of Things is the integration and unification of all communications sys-tems that surround us. Hence, the systems can get a total control and access to the other systems in orderto provide ubiquitous communication and computing with the purpose of defining a new generation ofservices.

IPv6 is considered the most suitable technology for the Internet of Things, since it offers scalability,flexibility, tested, extended, ubiquitous, open, and end-to-end connectivity.

For that reason, some efforts are being carried out to provide mechanisms for enabling an IPv6 ad-dress for each one of the things; ranging from identification tags and legacy technologies to the mentionedemerging technologies to build smart objects. Thereby, the integration of multi-technology networks ina common all-IP network is reached.

For the first nature of devices, i.e., identification tags, and legacy technologies from building automa-tion and industrial control the IPv6 Addressing Proxy technology has been proposed, and for the secondnature of devices, i.e., emerging technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy and to offer a lightweight in-tegration of IPv6 header for global communications an optimization of 6LoWPAN, denominated GLoW-BAL IPv6 has been proposed.

Thereby, Internet of Things is moving towards a more ubiquitous and mobile Internet-poweredecosystem.

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Once all the things are IPv6 addressable, we can consider that they are also empowered with all theIP protocols, i.e., protocol for mobility such as MIPv6 and security such as IPSec. However, it is notfeasible for all the things and resources integrated into the Internet of Things ecosystems to be associatedwith protocols designed with the considerations of devices with higher capabilities.

Internet of Things devices, the so-called smart objects, are energy and resource constrained, hostbased protocols require most of the signalling on end nodes and because the design features of theInternet of Things networks were not considered in the design issues of the host based protocols. Forexample, considering a network with the technology 6LoWPAN over IEEE 802.15.4, a 6LoWPAN nodemay run out of energy causing a fault in the network, this has restriction in size packets and this presentsaggressive techniques to conserve energy by using of sleep schedules with long sleep periods, they justwake up to receive IPv6 signalling messages, this feature introduces delays in the reception of messagesbecause they are not attended until that the node wakes up. Therefore, these delays, power restrictions,and packet size restrictions are not considered in the current IPv6 protocols.

Nevertheless, Mobility management and security continue being required for the Internet of Things.Mobility management is a desired feature for the emerging Internet of Things. Mobility-aware solu-

tions increase the connectivity and enhance adaptability to changes of location and infrastructure. Inter-net of Things is enabling a new generation of dynamic ecosystems in environments such as smart citiesand hospitals.

Dynamic ecosystems require ubiquitous access to Internet, seamless handover, flexible roaming poli-cies, and an interoperable mobility protocol with the existing Internet infrastructure. These features arechallenges for Internet of Things devices due to their constraints. The work presented in [1, 2] analysisof the requirements, desirable features, existing solutions and proposes, on the one hand, detection ofmovement direction for IEEE 802.15.4 radios to offer a fast handover, and on the other hand, an efficientsolution for constrained environments compatible with IPv6-existing protocols, i.e., Mobile IPv6.

Both solutions present a proper performance and solution, but the solution based on LightweightMobile IPv6 needs to be highlighted, since one of the major considerations for the Internet of Thingsis to offer scalable and inter-domain solutions that are not limited to specific application domains orinfrastructure.

The integration and interoperability with the existing infrastructure is one of main requirements formobility management in dynamic ecosystems, since mobile nodes require the capability to use othernetworks during roaming. For that reason, it is important to offer a highly compatible solution withavailable access points, routers and networks.

IPv6-based solutions are key enablers for the success of the Internet of Things interoperability, ac-ceptance and integration.

In addition to the mobility, security is a high requirement for the Internet of Things. This closerelationship between the cybernetic and the physical world enabled by the Internet of Things carries withit vulnerabilities in terms of security and privacy. Since vulnerability is now not simply limited to thehardware of our computer. as well it is also able to reach our energy systems, physical access controlsystems, and even when we cross the street in a smart city.

For that reason, security and privacy are considered as one of the major issues for the Internet ofThings. Security is already considered as a big issue in the current digital society, and several solutionsand mechanism have been built. Therefore, part of the path is already paved, the major challenge now ishow to extend these mechanisms to the Internet of Things devices, define new mechanisms more focusedon identity and privacy, and the most important challenge, how to make them scalable and feasible for afuture with billions of devices interconnected to Internet.

Security is also an inherent requirement for the mobility management, since this offers the capabilityto redirect traffic to a new address and claim the identity of a node. Therefore, mobility opens a highnumber of vulnerabilities for the man in the middle attacks, identity supplantation, and data integrity. In

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order to avoid these vulnerabilities, we require the authentication of the mobile node such as is carriedout in Mobile IPv6 with the trust relationship between the mobile node and its home agent.

In our previous works have been designed, developed and evaluated a scalable secure protocol forIPv6, i.e., IPSec.

IPSec support is mandatory with IPv6 and used by the MIPv6 protocols. MIPv6 is used to protectthe communications between the mobile node and the home agent.

IPSec presents two challenges, first, the cryptosuite which is to be used, and second the overheadfrom the IPSec headers. For the first issues, an optimization of the Elliptic Curve Cryptography to offera suitable asymmetric key cryptography for constrained devices is presented, regarding the overhead; alightweight integration of IPSec is analyzed.

The described evolution from the Internet of Things towards a ubiquitous and mobile Internet ishaving influence in several application areas and market sectors.

Security is a major requirement in clinical environments, since the security vulnerabilities directlyaffect patient health and privacy. For example, first, a Deny of Service (DoS) attack could stop continuousvital sign monitoring of a critical patient, consequently in case of anomalies, there would be no alarm.Second, impersonation attack could reply false information from a patient, e.g. informing that he is notin danger when he is. Therefore, the need for security mechanisms is clear to prevent the attacks and tominimize the adverse effects of such attacks in the healthcare market.

Internet of Things is considered one of the major communication advances in recent years, since itoffers the basis for the development of cooperative services and applications. Extensive research usingthis concept in different areas, such as building automation, Intelligent Transport Systems, and in par-ticular for healthcare, is being carried out. For example, its potential for mobile health applications hasbeen reported in [3, 4], showing its potential identification capacities for drug identification, and its com-munication capabilities in offering ubiquitous therapy by providing wireless and mobility capabilities forpersonal devices and smart objects, in addition to allowing the collection of data anytime and anywhere.

This work analyses the developed enablers to exploit the aforementioned Internet of Things capa-bilities in order to build a communication architecture that allows to exploit the IPv6 potential for theInternet of Things.

2 Why an Internet of Everything?

The Internet of Things (IoT) [5], or Machine-to-Machine (M2M), is one of the main drivers for theevolution of the Internet towards the Future Internet.

Nowadays, sensors, actuators and devices (so-called things), are connected to the Internet throughgateways and platforms such as Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition platforms (SCADAs), panels,and brokers. These gateways and platforms break the end-to-end connection with the Internet. For thatreason, this initial approach is defined as an Intranet of Things [6].

The Intranet is being extended to smart things [7] with a higher scalability, pervasiveness, and inte-gration into the Internet Core. This extension is leading to reach a real IoT, where things are first classcitizens in the Internet, and they do not need to relay any more on a gateway, middleware, proxy, orbroker.

IoT requires both an architecture and products that allow for the extension of Internet technologies,in order to reach a Future Internet of Things, Services and People.

IoT drives towards integrating everything into the Internet Core, this trend is the denominated Internetof Everything. The integration of everything is motivated by the market wish to have all processes re-motely accessible through an uniform medium – while at the same time understanding that re-engineeringan infrastructure to allow this for each application independently would be prohibitively costly and time-

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consuming. Moreover, the current evolution from uniform mass markets, to personalized ones, where thecustomization and user-specified adaptation is a requirement, makes the sort of uniform infrastructurefound in the Internet, imperative. This allows many components to be re-used, and services to be shared,with correspondingly huge economies of scale and shortened implementation times.

IoT fills the gap between the needs arising from the evolution of the market, information, users, andthings, by moving all of them to a common framework, the Internet. This is different from the currentapproach in such applications, where they are based on stand-alone and monolithic solutions designedfor a narrow or -stovepiped- application domain. Users now require more flexibility and freedom. Offer-ing a common framework allows choice among the available manufacturers, suppliers, service providers,delivery options, and payment services. While this obviates the need for standalone or proprietary solu-tions, it also requires a high level of integration.

IoT allows communication among very heterogeneous devices connected via a very wide range ofnetworks through the Internet infrastructure. IoT devices and resources are any kind of device connectedto Internet, from existing devices, such as servers, laptops, and personal computers, to emerging devicessuch as smart phones, smart meters, sensors, identification readers, and appliances.

In addition to the physical devices, IoT is also enriched with the cybernetic resources and Web-basedtechnologies. For that purpose, IoT is enabled with interfaces based on Web Services such as RESTFularchitecture and the novel protocol for Constrained devices Applications Protocol (CoAP) [8]. These in-terfaces enable the seamless integration of the IoT resources with information systems, management sys-tems, and the humans. Reaching thereby a universal and ubiquitous integration among human networks(i.e., society), appliance networks, sensor networks, machine networks, and, in definitive, everythingnetworks.

Due to the above mentioned potential, IoT is receiving a lot of attention from the academia andindustry sectors.

IoT offers several advantages and new capabilities for a wide range of application areas. For example,nowadays IoT is finding applications for the development of Smart Cities, starting with the Smart Grid,Smart Lighting and transport with new services such as Smart Parking and the Bicycle Sharing System[9] for building sustainable and efficiently smart ecosystems.

The application of the IoT is not limited to high scale deployments such as the locations in SmartCities, elsewhere it can also be considered for consumer electronics, vehicular communications, indus-trial control, building automation, logistic, retail, marketing, and healthcare.

3 Key challenges

IoT and ubiquitous integration of clinical environments define complex design challenges and require-ments in order to reach a suitable technology maturity for its wide deployment and market integration.From the beginning, IoT devices present inherited challenges since they are constrained devices with lowmemory, processing, communication and energy capabilities.

The first key challenge for a ubiquitous deployment is the integration of multi-technology networksin a common all-IP network to ensure that the communication network is reliable and scalable. Forthis purpose, IoT relies on the connectivity and reliability for its communications on Future Internetarchitecture and the IPv6 protocol to cover the addressing and scalability requirements.

The second key challenge is to guarantee security, privacy, integrity of information and user confiden-tiality. The majority of the IoT applications need to take into considerations the support of mechanisms tocarry out the authentication, authorization, access control, and key management. In addition, due to thereduced capabilities from the constrained devices enabled with Internet connectivity, a higher protectionof the edge networks needs to be considered with respect to the global network.

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The third key challenge is to offer support for the mobility, since the Future Internet presents a moreubiquitous and mobile Internet. Mobility support increases the applicability of Internet to new areas. Themost present nowadays are mobile platforms such as smart phones and tablets which enable a tremendousrange of applications based on ubiquitous location, context awareness, social networking, and interactionwith the environment. Future Internet potential is not limited to mobile platforms, else IoT is anotheremerging area of the Future Internet, which is offering a high integration of the cybernetic and physicalworld. Therefore, since the physical world is mobile and dynamic, IoT will require support mobile anddynamic ecosystems.

Mobility support in the IoT enables a global and continuous connection of all the devices withoutrequiring the disruption of the communication sessions. For example, mobility management in hospitalsis required since clinical devices can be connected through wireless technologies. Mobility offers highlyvaluable features such as higher quality of experiences for the patients, since this allows the patients tomove freely, continuous monitoring through portable/wearable sensors, extend the coverage within allthe hospital, and finally a higher fault tolerance since the mobility management allows the connection toadapt dynamically to different access points. Therefore, clinical environment is one of the main scenarioswhere the mobility for the IoT-based applications exploit these capabilities, in terms of fault toleranceinfluences directly in the life support, and continuous monitoring influences the quantity of data availablewhich is required for real-time diagnostic.

Finally, other challenges are also arising from the application, economical, and technological per-spectives. For example, from an application point of view are the requirements for processing largeamounts of data for a growing number of devices, it is the so-called Big Data. From the economic pointsof view, the needs to provide economies of scale, i.e., new services based on existing modules in order toleverage the related platform investment. From the networking point of view to offer an end-to-end sup-port for Quality of Service (QoS), since the different IoT applications will present different requirementsin terms of latency and bandwidth, for example, for clinical environments the traffic should be prioritizedover other non-critical traffic coming from smart-metering.

The Figure 1 describes the key challenges to offer an Internet of Everything. This covers from theintegration of heterogeneous devices to the integration into a Web of Things.

The following subsections describe in more detail the current status of the challenges in terms ofheterogeneity, connectivity/reliability, security and mobility.

Heterogeneity

IoT started focusing on building blocks such as Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID), due to its capa-bilities of identifying the uniqueness of an object in the world. After that initial approach, the technologyevolved and the IoT was not much more a metaphor for RFID capabilities, else it was feasible that thedevices such as sensors and appliances were connected to the IoT. Thereby, it was giving birth to smartthings and smart objects concepts, as an evolution of the devices located at the Wireless Sensor Networks(WSN) with IPv6 connectivity through protocols such as the mentioned 6LoWPAN [10].

IoT market is developing new technologies such as WiFi Low Power, Bluetooth Low Energy, IEEE802.15.4g, and Near Field Communications (NFC), which are the evolution of the initial RFID andWSN (IEEE 802.15.4) towards very well-known and interoperable technologies with the new generationof personal devices such as laptops, tablets and smart phones.

IoT deployments are not limited to RFID, WSN and the mentioned emerging technologies; the ma-jority of the IoT scenarios and ecosystems are composed of heterogeneous IoT devices based on differenttechnologies with different capabilities such as legacy building automation technologies (e.g., BACnet,Konnex, X10), industrial devices based on industrial protocols (e.g., Control Area Network (CAN), M-BUS, Wireless M-BUS), smart grid technologies (e.g., smart metering), and smart cities technologies

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Figure 1: Key challenges to offer an Internet of Everything.

(e.g., parking pots, street lights, environmental sensors).For example, deployments in clinical environments cover multiple types of devices ranging from

passive things to active things. An IoT-based clinical environment can be composed of the wheelchairs,drugs and instruments that are tagged with RFID passive tags, and also of active things such as patientmonitors, clinical devices, appliances, and personal devices (e.g., laptops, smart phones, tablets).

In conclusion, since IoT ecosystems will be composed of a high range of technologies, a suitablesupport for the heterogeneity needs to be provided by the IoT communication architecture. The goalsare firstly, to evaluate the capabilities of 6LoWPAN based on IEEE 802.15.4 for IoT applications andclinical environments. Second, to evaluate the capabilities of the IoT for emerging technologies such asNFC as an evolution of RFID, and Bluetooth Low Energy as an evolution of initial WSNs, and finally, todevelop a communication architecture that allows the integration of heterogeneous devices in a commonenvironment.

Connectivity and reliability

The number of devices that are connected to the Internet is growing exponentially. This has led todefining a new conception of Internet, the commonly called Future Internet, which started with a newversion of the Internet Protocol (IPv6) that extends the addressing space in order to support all theemerging Internet-enabled devices.

IPv6 is the fundamental technology for the IoT. It is estimated that several billion things will beconnected by 2020. Unlike IPv4, IPv6 can address this number of objects. The IPv6 address spacesupports 2128 unique addresses (approximately 3.4∗1038). Specifically, it can offer 1.7∗1017 addresseson an area about the size of the tip of a pen. The advantages of the IPv6 integration in the IoT are not

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limited to a universal addressing space; its main advantages are to offer stable, scalable, extensive, andtested protocols for global end-to-end communication, device/service discovery, mobility, end-to-endsecurity, and other relevant features such as stateless addressing auto-configuration, multicast addressingfor group operations, and its flexibility for the application layer with technologies such as Web Services.

IPv6 has been designed to provide secure communications to users and all the devices attached tothem; thereby users are always connected.

IPv6 features are what have made possible thinking about connecting all the objects and build theIoT. The objective of IoT is the integration and unification of all communications systems that surroundus. Hence, the systems can get a control and access total to the other systems for leading to provideubiquitous communication and computing with the purpose of defining a new generation of services.

IoT is enabled by tiny and highly constrained devices, so-called smart objects. These devices havelow-performance properties due to their constraints in terms of memory capacity, computation capabilityand energy autonomy. In addition, their communication capabilities present a low bandwidth, limitedreachability because of the usage of hard duty cycles and consequently unstable connectivity for solutionwith a very low duty cycle and high power constraint.

These devices with constrained connectivity and communication capacity are what we can find, fromsome years ago, in the Low-power Wireless Personal Area Networks (LoWPANs).

The IETF working group has defined IPv6 over that LoWPANs (6LoWPAN) to extend Internet tosmart devices [11]. 6LoWPAN offers the LoWPANs all the advantages from IP such as scalability,flexibility, well tested, extended, ubiquitous, open, and end-to-end connectivity.

It could be considered that 6LoWPAN devices are also empowered with IP protocols, i.e., protocolfor mobility such as MIPv6, management such as SNMP, security such as IPSec, etc. However it is notfeasible for 6LoWPAN devices to be associated with host-based protocols such as mobility, manage-ment, security etc. because 6LoWPAN nodes are energy and resource constrained. Host-based protocolsrequire most of the signaling on end nodes and because the design features of 6LoWPAN network werenot considered in the design issues of the host-based protocols. For example, a 6LoWPAN node may runout of energy causing a fault in the network. This has restrictions in size packets and presents aggressivetechniques to conserve energy by using sleep schedules with long sleep periods, devices just wake up toreceive IPv6 signaling messages. This feature introduces delays in the reception of messages becausethey are not attended to until the node wakes up. Therefore, these delays, power restrictions, packet sizerestrictions etc. are not considered in the current IPv6 protocols.

The goal to solve the initial challenge for connectivity and reliability is to move toward the commonaddressing space of Internet (IPv6) to all the resources and devices available in an IoT ecosystem. In thismanner, an Internet of Everything can be reached.

Security

Security is a wide concept which covers everything from authenticity (ensuring that the end-user iswho is claimed to be), authority (ensuring that the end-user is allowed to perform the requested action),integrity (the data received is exactly the same data transmitted), and confidentiality (communication isnot understandable for intermediary users, even when an intruder is in the network). These concepts aresatisfied through a set of protocols, algorithms and cryptographic primitives.

The IoT security has been one of the most discussed and yet pending issues, even after of the exis-tence of protocols for IPv6 network security such as IPSec, and for datagrams (i.e., UDP or CoAP) suchas DTLS. Security for the IoT is not excessively extended and deployed because of the difficulties in con-figuring (IPSec) for end users and the lack of scalable certificate management for DTLS. Consequently,the majority of the Internet traffic continues being transmitted in plain text, i.e., unprotected.

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For that reason, one of the initial actions in order to carry out an effective deployment of autonomousand unassisted IoT deployments that satisfies the scalability and self-management requirements from theIoT is the development of protocols for authentication and key management.

Specifically, on the one hand, the protocol for the authentication and key management at the networklayer such as the Protocol for Carrying Authentication for Network Access (PANA) [12] is being con-sidered by the research institutions and also industrial alliances, such as the ZigBee Alliance for theirZigBee IP stack [13].

On the other hand, the IPSec set of protocols (i.e., Internet Key Exchange (IKE) and EncapsulationSecurity Protocol (ESP)), and another protocols at the medium access layer such as 802.1x, are also beingconsidered. All of these share the usage of the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) to transport thesecurity credentials.

Therefore, the challenge is not limited to the protocol, else the EAP scheme needs to be optimizedin terms of a proper support of the required cryptographic primitives by the constrained device, i.e.,symmetric cryptography algorithm to protect the packet, hash function to ensure the integrity and au-thenticate of the packet, and finally asymmetric cryptographic algorithm to carry out the key exchangeand initial authentication.

Some initial works for the IoT have been proposed for IPSec [14], where several pending problemshave been found, since for example a low version of the symmetric cryptography with 32-bit keys is used,such as AES-CBC-32, which are very weak. In addition, this relies on pre-shared keys for IPsec, whichis not very scalable. Therefore, it does not solve the scalability and self-management requirements.

In order to satisfy these requirements, a Key Management Protocol (KMP) can be considered, thatallows keys to be refreshed periodically (therefore maintaining acceptable security levels). Specifically,an automatic key exchange mechanism is required; thereby, each node can keep track of the securityassociations (SA) that specify how a particular IP flow should be treated in terms of security.

The most extended KMP is IKE. A very simple approach of IKE has been defined in [15], whichdoes not satisfy all the requirements and functionality for a full SA establishment.

Other issues from IPSec is that the overhead caused by a IPsec packet (the extra bytes on the IPheader) can force the packet to be fragmented (the link layer payload that includes the extra IPsec bytesbecomes bigger than the maximum size of a 802.15.4 packet), thus an extra packet must be sent to thelink layer and the energy/network overhead will become bigger. In addition, this overhead problemis worse with the ESP mode of IPSec, since the internal headers of IPv6 and UDP are encrypted andconsequently cannot be compressed.

In addition to IPSec, the majority of works from the CORE Working Group in IETF are focused onthe integration of security through the transport layer security solutions such as DTLS for CoAP. DTLSis the default security for CoAP.

A pre-shared key mode (PSK) is also considered by CoAP, with the aforementioned problems re-garding the lack of scalability for this pre-establishment of the security credentials.

CoAP also offers a very interesting approach based on RawPublicKey, i.e., a solution based on the useof an asymmetric key pair, but without an X.509 certificate metadata. This approach is highly relevantsince it can manage the identity issues mentioned in the introduction section, in order to verify theauthenticity of the device and its link with the manufacturer. For example, the Certification Authority(CA) of the public key can also indicate the list of identities of the nodes, with which it can communicate.It can thereby indicate the entities which are trustworthy in the initial verification and bootstrappingphase.

CoAP also considers certificates, i.e., X.509 certificate that binds it to its Authority Name and issigned by some common trust root, e.g., the manufacturer.

In order to optimize DTLS for smart objects, DTLS 1.2 [16] offers the schemes to re-use the cryp-tographic hardware supported by the majority of the IEEE 802.15.4 transceivers for the symmetric cryp-

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tography, i.e., AES CCM. In addition, it considers the usage of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) forthe asymmetric cryptography, thereby making DTLS more suitable for these constrained devices.

Nowadays, DTLS is being considered by the Smart Energy profile for ZigBee alliance (SE 2.0), andit is also being considered as an adaptation of DTLS 1.2 in the IPSO Alliance based on the subset allowedby RFC6347.

In addition to the solutions presented, there is security support over the current Internet architecturebased on IPv6 in the network layer and UDP/TCP for the transport layer, where the security is basedon IPSec for IPv6 and DTLS/TLS for UDP/TCP respectively. Also two solutions from the IETF tosupport the ID/Locator split have been defined. The first, HIP, has been developed by the Host IdentityProtocol (HIP) Working Group, a group mainly focused on improving security of the Future Internet,and the HIP Diet EXchange (HIP DEX) [17], which has been optimized for constrained environmentssuch as the Internet of Things. HIP offers in a single mechanism the capabilities for authentication andestablishment of the communication.

Therefore, the goals to solve for the security support are as follows. The first goal is to optimizecryptographic primitives for the described protocols. Especially, ECC is for the asymmetric cryptogra-phy. The second one is to analyze and evaluate the impact of IP security protocol (IPSec) for constraineddevices while the last one is to analyze the possibilities for novel protocols that satisfies the scalabilityand self-management requirements.

Mobility

Mobility presents several challenges for the efficiency of networks and protocols, since mobility proto-cols have to deal with inherent characteristics of IoT such as hard duty cycles (i.e., long sleep period),reduced energy and processing capabilities, and constrained bandwidth.

Mobility management is composed of two fundamental phases, on the one hand, the movementdetection in order to be aware of the device changing its location and consequently will require linkingto an alternative network, on the other hand, the signaling and control messages required to be awareof changing locations, (i.e., network and locator), to the networks and clients relative to the device inmovement.

Movement detection is solved through active scan, passive overhearing of messages from other pro-tocols, or specific signaling from the mobility protocol.

Mobility signaling is being solved in different ways mainly split into two trends, on the one hand, atrend based on an evolutionary research following the IPv6-based approach and current Internet archi-tecture, and on the other hand, a clean-slate, where new architectures are proposed that require majorchanges in the existing protocols and networking philosophy.

The clean-slate trend is based on new concepts such as ID/Locator split architectures such as thosepresented in LISP [18], developed by the Locator ID Separation Group (LISP) Working Group which isfocused on improving the scalability of the routing for the Future Internet, and HIMALIS presented in[19].

HIMALIS architecture offers lightweight mobility management based on the ID/Locator split con-cept. The ID/Locator split architecture employs two different values, one for identification (ID) andanother for location (Locator). Therefore, the device changes its Locator in the network layer whenthe device changes its position in the network topology. The most relevant aspect of this split is thatthe Locator changes without requiring upper layers to change the ID, thereby ensuring that establishedcommunication sessions associated with the ID are not interrupted by mobility.

These kinds of architectures present the advantage that mobility is directly supported by the sepa-ration of the session identification with the locator of the device, which is the problem of the currentInternet architecture. Previous works for the IoT have been focused on this approach, the main issue is

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that the overhead for 6LoWPAN devices is increased since there is the need to transport one additionalheader for the identification layer. These types of solutions are very relevant from the research pointof view, but they present the main inconvenience of not being feasible, since the current hardware andinfrastructure deployed is not ready for this kind of approach.

For that reason, the other trend is the evolutionary research approach; this follows the current Internetarchitecture for the management of the identification and location, i.e., IPv6 continues being used forIdentification of the session in the transport and application layers, and Locator of the devices for routingin the network layer. These solutions allow continuing using the existing infrastructure and overcomethe problem using a similar concept to the ID/Locator split but in an implicit way. Specifically, the mainprotocol following the evolutionary approach is Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6). MIPv6 uses two IPv6 addresses,fist, the initial address of the device, commonly denominated Home Address is used as identifier, andsecond, the new address in the visited network, commonly called care-of address, is used as locator.

MIPv6 protocol provides the signaling messages and IPv6 header extensions to manage the bindingbetween these two addresses. In addition, this defines the security mechanisms and networking require-ments in order to avoid the identity supplantation and man-in-the-middle attacks.

The main concerns of MIPv6 is that it presents a high overhead for the data packets when the mobilenode is in roaming, since this needs to include the destination option to specify its Home Address in caseof applied route optimization or build an IPv6 tunnel which requires an additional IPv6 header. Bothcases require a high overhead.

The second problem with Mobile IPv6 is that IPSec is mandatory in order to protect the communi-cations between the mobile node and the home agent. Such as mentioned, the trust relationship betweenthe mobile node and the home agent is a fundamental requirement of MIPv6, since all the security of thebinding update for the mapping between the care-of address and home address, and additional securityprocesses such as the return routability for the route optimization are based on this trust relationship.

Therefore, the goals for the mobility support are, first, to design new techniques for fast movementdetection. Second, to design and evaluate a lightweight implementation of MIPv6 to offer a secure andefficient mobility management for the IoT.

4 IPv6-based solutions

The described challenges, in terms of connectivity, reliability, security, and mobility, can be addressedthrough IPv6 solutions. Specifically, the Figure 2 presents the technologies considered to satisfy thepreviously challenges through the IPv6-based technologies.

4.1 Connectivity and reliability

The bases of the Internet of Things is provide connectivity and reliability.In order to satisfy these requirements, the interconnection framework has relied on Internet technol-

ogy, in particular IPv6. Since, IPv6 is the main enabler for extending the Internet of Things to the FutureInternet.

The work presented in [20] presents how the architecture has been powered by the IPv6 connectivityin order to provide an homogeneous, scalable, and interoperable medium for integrating heterogeneousdevices built on technologies such as 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth Low Energy, legacy devices and identifica-tion technologies.

In more detail, our works have proposed two novel solutions to enable ubiquitous connectivity andreliability, on the one hand, GLoWBAL IPv6 presented in [21], and on the other the IPv6 AddressingProxy for legacy technologies presented in the Chapter [22, 23].

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Figure 2: Key challenges to offer an Internet of Everything.

GLoWBAL IPv6 has been proposed to optimize global addressing involving smart devices such asthat found in low power wireless personal area networks (LoWPAN). GLoWBAL IPv6 has the furtheradvantage of providing efficient addressing and integration to both IEEE 802.15.4 sensor devices, whichdo not offer native support for 6LoWPAN, and also to other technologies which do not support IPv6communication capability into their stacks.

GLoWBAL IPv6 defines an Access Address/Identifier (AAID) to reduce the overhead from the net-work and transport headers. AAID simplifies IPv6 and UDP communication parameters (source anddestination addresses/ports, originally 36 bytes long) to a single 4-byte communication identifier aug-mented by one byte for the Dispatch header, totaling 5 bytes for the GLoWBAL IPv6 header. Thus,the IPv6/UDP headers are significantly reduced. This mechanism achieves an efficient frame format forglobal communications in networks that do not have native support for IPv6.

An example of its potential is described. Let take a heterogeneous device with a Bluetooth LowEnergy interface, such as a smart phone with also Internet connectivity through the cellular networkinterface. GLoWBAL IPv6 fills the IPv6 addressing requirement for any smart thing connected to thesmart phones through the Bluetooth Low Energy network by acting as the mapping protocol betweenthe Local Network (capillary network) and the wide-area network (cellular network) using appropriatelyconstructed IPv6 addresses. , Consequently this smart phone can efficiently enable with IPv6 throughGLoWBAL IPv6 to the smart things connected through its Bluetooth Low Energy interface. But, GLoW-BAL IPv6 is not a suitable solution for all devices that need to be enabled IPv6, since all the devices donot offer programming capabilities such as a smart phone or a gateway. Examples of these devicescan be found in the inherited legacy technologies from the industrial and building automation markets.

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These markets present a rather fragmented set of technologies. Each technology comes with a set of fit-for-purpose sensors and their respective application environments which lack efficient interoperabilityamong them. Some associations of manufactures have been formed to build common technology frame-works, e.g., Konnex (KNX) for building automation. While such de facto standards present widespreadadoption to date, this does not discourage use of other relevant protocols such as the emerging ZigBeeand the older X10. Due to this fragmentation, the support of this heterogeneity in order to shift towardsa common access and communication framework based on IPv6 is also considered.

For that reason, an additional solution has been proposed to embrace all existing native addressingschemes. This solution has defined IPv6 mappings for each native addressing scheme by use of anIPv6 Addressing Proxy which handles the translations between an IPv6 address and its correspondingtechnology addressing, i.e. the native addressing depends on the technology.

IPv6 Addressing Proxy provides a transparent mechanism for the users and devices to map the differ-ent addressing spaces from each legacy technology to a common IPv6 addressing space. Specifically, theIPv6 addressing proxy is a technology-dependent mechanism for mapping each device to the differentsub-networks built under the IPv6 prefix addresses provided by the Internet Service Provider. The IPv6addressing proxy enables IPv6 addressing to all the devices regardless of the device technology thus of-fering a scalable and homogeneous solution to interact with devices which do not support IPv6 address-ing. The IPv6 addressing proxy has been implemented in a multi-protocol card, and its performance,scalability and interoperability through a protocol built over IPv6 has been evaluated successfully.

4.2 Scalable security and mobility

First, IPv6 supports connectivity and reliability with the heterogeneous resources thanks to the presentedinterconnection framework and the IPv6 features. Then, the communication architecture is required tooffer higher communication capabilities such as security and mobility. For that reason, the next goal hasbeen to support scalable security and mobility.

Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) is the protocol founded on IPv6 to support mobility. MIPv6 uses two IPv6addresses, the initial address of the device, denominated Home Address, as identifier (ID), and the newaddress in the visited network, denominated care-of address, as Locator.

MIPv6 protocol provides the signaling messages and IPv6 header extensions to manage the bindingbetween these two addresses. In addition, this defines the security mechanisms and networking require-ments in order to avoid the identity replacement and man-in-the-middle attacks.

The feasibility of MIPv6 for constrained devices such as that considered for the IoT was initiallyanalyzed in the work presented in [1]. These works concluded that MIPv6 presents a high overhead forthe data packets when the mobile node is in roaming, since this needs to include the destination optionto specify its home address in case of route optimization applied or build an IPv6 tunnel which requiresan additional IPv6 header.

In addition, IPSec is analyzed in [24, 25], as IPSec is mandatory for MIPv6 in order to ensure thetrust relationship between the mobile node and the home agent. This communication protection betweenthe mobile node and the home agent is a fundamental requirement of MIPv6, since all the security of thebinding update for the mapping between the care-of address and home address, and additional securityprocesses such as the return routability for the route optimization are based on this trust relationship.

IPSec presents the difficulty that encapsulates an IPv6 packet inside another. The problem with thisencapsulation is that the inner header cannot be compressed and optimized. Therefore, the overheadcoming from the inner header (40 bytes) cannot be waived. For that reason, the works carried out in[24, 25], analyzes the impact of MIPv6 with IPSec over 6LoWPAN networks and the conclusion isthat the unique way to offer an interoperable integration of the mobility with MIPv6 is without routeoptimization and using IPSec only for tunneling/encapsulation. Consequently the inner header can also

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be compressed. However, this approach presents security vulnerabilities in the case that the applicationlayer is not secure. For that reason, this work also analyzes the suitability of IPSec ESP to providesecurity to the encapsulated packet in order to avoid any security vulnerabilities.

4.3 Application protocol

During the last few years the promoters of the IoT, from academia and industry, have been focused onempowering these constrained devices with the protocols and functions of Internet-enabled devices.

The initial steps, the constrained capabilities of the IoT devices and differences between IPv6 designissues, have led to develop lightweight versions of the existing protocols. These lightweight versionshave the advantage that they continue being interoperable/translatable to the full implementations. Forexample, a lightweight implementation of the IP stack such as uIP [26] and header compression throughthe 6LoWPAN protocol [27] have been developed in order to reach Internet connectivity. In addition,as a generic and wide supported application protocol, Web Services through RESTFul architecture havealso been adapted for the IoT devices with lightweight and compressed protocols such as the ConstrainedApplication Protocol (CoAP) [8, 28]. CoAP is an equivalent to HTTP but considers the constraint issuesof the IoT devices, with the capability to be mapped to HTTP and offer at least an equivalent potential, forsome scenarios it is even able to offer higher capabilities, since it has been designed with the IoT-relatedscenarios and requirements in mind.

IPv6 and WebServices offer the primitives to build application protocols for different use cases, asthe final purpose of the communication architecture is its usage and exploitation for different applicationsand use cases. However, this requires definition on top of CoAP/IPv6 a description of the resources fromthe different application and used cases. For this purpose, application profiles and guidelines such as theOpen Mobile Alliance Lightweight Device Management for M2M (OMA LWM2M) [29] in the contextof the oneM2M for cellular networks, and IPSO Application Guidelines [30] for capillary networks arebeing defined.

5 Future works and vision

This work has described the key components to reach the evolution of connectivity, reliability, supportfor heterogeneity, security and mobility.

This section describes the ongoing and future works to continue enhancing the potential of the IoTand its application in eHealth/mHealth and emerging areas such as Smart Cities.

5.1 Towards an interoperable Internet of Things

The evolution of the IoT in order to build interoperable ecosystems is yet in progress.The first goal of the IoT has been to offer interconnectivity to everything, i.e. connect things to

the Internet. Once connectivity is achieved we need to cope with heterogeneity and enable a seamlessinteroperability among the different entities. For this purpose, the existing heterogeneous islands ofdevices have been focused on moving towards IPv6. Specifically, this integration at the connectivity levelis reached with solutions such as 6LoWPAN [27], and the contributions from our previous experiencessuch as GLoWBAL IPv6 and the IPv6 Addressing Proxies.

After connectivity is reached, then a common protocol for the transport and application layer isrequired. The most extended application in the Internet is the World Wide Web, and consequently the datatransfer protocol designed for the Web, i.e., the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP). The capabilitiesof offering an homogeneous application protocol in HTTP have been squeezed by the Web Servicesduring the last decade. Nowadays, technologies such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), for the

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representation of resources, and JavaScript, for building logic and intelligence, are making its potentialeven greater. For example, HTML5 and JavaScript enable everyday desktop applications over the Web,at the same time, providing a road on which to interoperate and exchange information among differentapplications. For that reason, the next step in the IoT had been to connect things to the Web, therebyconceiving the so-called Web of Things.

The new protocols such as Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and other lightweight versionsof HTTP make interaction with resources from constrained devices through Web clients such as browsers,feasible. This Web-based interaction offers to the Internet of Things the simplicity and flexibility that theWeb offers nowadays.

The Web of Things is allowing different things and systems to interact together. As a result, itcomposes more complex services and solutions. These interactions are enabled through the definition ofapplication programming interfaces (API) over HTTP or CoAP protocol. Consequently, the applicationsgive leverage to the HTTP protocol in order to provide the interface for publishing data updates into thesystem, for retrieving data updates from the system, and in general, exchange of information.

The data can be encoded with different envelopes, semantics and metadata. For example, the datacan be encapsulated in plain text, over complex structures such as XML/EXI or simpler but yet organizedstructures such as JSON. In addition, they can be represented with different format and units, and finallythey can offer additional information.

The current market of the IoT is focused on deployments that are connected vertically, i.e. stovepiped,to the specific sensors and applications for which they have been designed in order to address specificrequirements and target a specific use case. However, the IoT requires horizontal integration of multiplecapabilities and resources towards a larger ecosystem.

Therefore, IoT is not only a vehicle for communication, but also is about integration and interoper-ability, and to this end, semantic is the major driver.

The challenge after the Web of Things, is to build a Semantic Web of Things (SWoT) in order toensure a common understanding as a result of which resources would be able to cooperate, be shared,linked, and combined in order to build complex services with higher intelligence and context aware.Thus, the Internet of Things will provide added value to the existing and emerging markets, which wouldexploit the huge potential of everything connected being controllable and providing continuously (i.e.every time) data from everywhere.

The SWoT is, on the one hand, the fusion of the trends of the IoT for moving towards Web technolo-gies with protocols such as CoAP, REST architecture and the Web of Things concept, and on the otherhand, the evolution of the Web with the Semantic Web technologies.

SWoT promises a seamless extension to the IoT allowing integration of both the physical and digitalworlds. SWoT is focused on providing wide scale interoperability that allows the sharing and re-useof these things. Consequently, the use cases and markets of the IoT will not be held back to verticalsolutions or pre-established use cases. In fact, these deployed infrastructures and available data cantarget other secondary markets and use cases, since the data that they are collecting and managing can beof importance in providing data analysis (aggregated, anonymity, processed information, e.g. for SmartCity administration). They provide a major understanding of the primary markets, since they can becontrasted and extended with the available third party data.

Therefore, the challenges to move from the IoT/WoT towards the SWoT are several, some of theseare to define a common description that callow data to be universally understandable create extensi-ble annotations, i.e. from minimal semantic descriptions towards more elaborate ones, and agree on acatalogue of semantic descriptions.

These challenges can be addressed only in an ideal ecosystem, since several products will developunique features that will be out of the scope of the existing standards and each manufacturer is associ-ated with a different standard organization, and the standards landscape related to M2M is very large.

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Nowadays in numbers, the Global Standards Collaboration Machine-Machine Task Force (GSC MSTF)identifies 143 organizations with a direct or indirect interest in M2M standardization [31].

The ongoing work looks into the convergence of the emerging standards, of the capillary and cellularnetworks, towards an interoperable IoT ecosystem.

First, the standards considered for cellular networks have been initialized by the European side withthe ETSI M2M and extended globally with the oneM2M initiative, which is already offering the OMALightweight Device Management Protocol.

Second, the standards considered for capillary networks are supported by organizations such as theInternet Engineering Task Force with solutions such as CoAP, which is supported by industry alliancessuch as IPSO Alliance, with the IPSO OMA Web Objects Application Guidelines. The capillary net-works present major heterogeneity and other standards for offering a lightweight reliable messagingtransport protocol for the IoT such as the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol. Thisprotocol is optimized to connect physical world devices and events with enterprise servers and otherconsumers supported by OASIS and Eclipse Foundation [32], and other private standards such as theZigBee-IP solution for Smart Energy (SE 2.0) supported by the ZigBee Alliance [13].

Other activities and projects are the W3C with the SSN-XG ontology for offering a semantic layerfor the IoT, the European Research Cluster on the Internet of Things (IERC), and its projects such asOpenIoT, IoT.est, and SPITFIRE where the capabilities of RDF, OWL and classic semantic technologiesfor the IoT have been explored.

Since the current environment regarding semantic is quite fuzzy, the future work requires reaching amore homogeneous and clear standards ecosystem, where the manufacturers and vendors can determinewhat to apply to where in the different IoT use cases.

5.2 Towards a distributed trust and security

The future work should be focused on solutions to carry out IoT/M2M trust verification, through amechanism such as capabilities-based access control [33, 34]. Consequently, novel scenarios based ontemporal access to resources can be defined. For example, a house proprietor with an access controlsolution (e.g. a smart door lock) is able to offer temporal access to his neighbour so as to go everyday atanytime from 15:00 to 18:00 in order to feed the pets and irrigate the plants.

The mechanisms required to offer secure solutions that make usage of the IoT capabilities feasibleduring usual human activities and behaviors, where devices and physical resources are involved, needsto be enhanced. As a result, these new mechanisms and solutions will facilitate the introduction of theIoT as part of the Internet-powered society.

The communications between IoT-devices and humans present two different ways to be satisfied, thefirst, an integration of the required communication technologies and capabilities in personal devices suchas Smart Phones. Following this approach, the potential of WiFi Low Power, Bluetooth Low Energy, andNear Field Communication could be exploited. Thus, the smart object can talk with the personal devicethrough the same medium technologies, i.e. WiFi Low Power, Bluetooth Low Energy, etc. Howeverthis approach presents high requirements such as compatibility in the medium technology between thepersonal device and the smart object. Consequently it is limiting the availability and success of thesesolutions.

For that reason, the other approach is the exploitation of the common and abstracted communicationmedium with IP technology. In this case, the personal device and the objects can be connected to theInternet through any communication interface, and communication between them is based on the end-to-end feature of the IP technology. As a result, it is not required that the smart object and the personaldevice use similar technology to establish the communication.

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These distributed security scenarios, based on both IP abstracted technology and direct interaction,are being explored with the techniques such as the capability-based token mentioned.

5.3 Towards a ubiquitous and mobile Internet of Things

IoT and M2M are being enabled and developed from the capillary and the cellular points of view. Untilnow, mobile IoT for the capillary networks with the lightweight Mobile IPv6 protocol has been explored.

However, a mobile IoT based on cellular networks to also provide ubiquitous access and mobilitybetween different networks can also be defined.

The mobile IoT based on capillary networks present challenges in terms of the availability of cover-age in a wide scale, and the lack of agreements among different network access providers involved.

For that reason, the IoT based on cellular networks perspective is also gaining attention, since thisprovides a wider range of coverage, and homogeneous technology worldwide (regulated by the 3GPPAlliance). In particular, the last version of the Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) standard defineshow to integrate IoT/M2M devices.

The inconvenience of the cellular networks continue to be the requirement of a subscription (i.e.dependence with a network access provide), higher power consumption, and higher costs.

For that reason, mobility protocols with vertical handoff among different technologies, i.e. betweencapillary and cellular networks need to be explored, in order to provide the best trade-off in terms ofcommunication costs, availability and reliability.

These kind of signaling protocols between cellular and capillary networks are becoming a reality,thanks to the convergence of both with the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) Lightweight Device Manage-ment Protocol (LWM2M).

Therefore, a set of objects for the mobility-related signaling can be defined, which can be supportedby the solutions promoted from the cellular vendors and manufacturers (i.e. oneM2M Alliance), andfrom the capillary vendors and manufacturers (i.e. IPSO Alliance).

5.4 Towards a valuable Internet of Things

Finally, the major challenge for the Internet of Things is to demonstrate its value to the end-customers.The potential of the end-to-end connectivity and convergence with the Internet and Web protocols

are providing, from the developing and engineering perspective, highly valuable advantages.Some of these advantages are the reduction of costs for the development of solutions thanks to the

re-usage of existing technologies; major interoperability thanks to common communications technology;major control and monitoring capabilities; a major number of possibilities to compose services based oncybernetic and physical resources, and major flexibility.

However, even when this list of advantages could be considered sufficient motivation to justify thevalue of the IoT, it continues to not be enough from the consumers’ perspective, since none of them aredirectly related to perceptible values by the end user.

All of them provide big opportunities to develop and offer a solution that can break through the mar-ket. However, the killer solutions or applications based on the IoT, which demonstrate to the consumersthe potential of the IoT, are yet to come.

In my opinion, the two trends to build this value powered by the IoT potential can be based on anevolve approach, or in a totally novel value proposal.

Regarding the evolve approach, the IoT can offer the same solutions that nowadays are being offeredby existing technologies but with major simplicity for usage, interaction and understanding. For example,current industrial automation solutions (e.g., SCADA) are featured by a complex set-up process, where aset of skills and training is required. The potential of the IoT is to set-up these physical devices through

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more understandable platforms such as smart phones, remotely through Internet-based solutions, andeven automatic configuration based on the smart capabilities of smart objects to come. For example, someof their smart capabilities are the potential to discover other devices, exchange messages with control andmonitoring systems, and set-up automatically a big part of the conventionally required parameters.

An example of this approach is what our ongoing work is offering with the developed Smart Driverfor lighting in Smart Cities. The Smart Driver is featured by being a power supplier with Internet connec-tivity and processing capabilities. These new two features offer the potential to set-up current, voltage,and logic scheduling directly from any IP-enabled device without requiring the set-up with specific andcomplex solutions, while the device is connected to a proprietary software or device.

The other approach is to offer a novel value proposal, which is inspired in the potential of the data.One of the advantages of this new capability to connect with everything is the potential capability tocollect data from everything in a major frequency on a temporary basis. Consequently, this data withproper data mining, a.k.a. Big Data tools, will offer solutions that were not feasible before.

For instance, following the example of street lighting, the data gathered from each street light is notlimited to the control of the street light, it can also offer additional data from humidity, temperature, nose,quality of air, motion, etc. Thus, novel solutions such as noisy maps and pollution maps can be built toevaluate the quality in the different zones before renting or buying a house.

In addition to the sensors that can been integrated in the Smart Driver itself, these Smart Objectspresent endless possibilities, since they can be also seen as the infrastructure to connect and communicateto any device.

Therefore, the integration of the Internet and IoT-related capabilities in a street light that initiallycould be motivated to optimize power consumption, simplify the set-up, and enable the remote andmonitoring platforms, is also converted into a big opportunity to build a nerve for the rest of the devices.This nerve can provide connectivity to the parking pots, citizens’ devices, cars, gardens, and in short, anyof the entities that are part of the city ecosystem.

The smart lighting solution described for smart cities pursue the goal of offering major power con-sumption reduction, and a major awareness about air and acoustical pollution in order to carry out theproper actions to enhance sustainability.

Another example based on eHealth/mHealth is the interconnection among different devices. Forexample, for patients with diabetes type 1, devices for Continuous Glucose Monitoring (GCM) and alsoinsulin pumps to provide the insulin therapy are provided nowadays.

These devices are starting to be able to interact between each other, but without any action, only toshow the data to the user, due to the lack of intelligence in both them.

IoT enables the insulin pump and the GCM to interact with intelligence devices such as a smartphone, swatch, and even with a backend system deployed in the cloud that can offer a calculus of theinsulin therapy based on the patient’s health record, evolution, and in short Big Data from the patient.Consequently, the loop between monitoring, therapy and user can be closed in a smarter and simplerway, and consequently avoid that the user needs to introduce manually the insulin dosage in the insulinpump multiple times per day.

These mHealth-based solutions pursue the goal of offering to patients with chronic diseases a majorlevel of freedom with respect to their illness, and quality of life. All these new interaction models,knowledge, and improvement of the existing solutions are some of the ways that we can start buildingand probing the value of the IoT. In short, the IoT is another enabler to continue improving both qualityof life and experiences, and planet sustainability.

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6 Conclusions

IoT defines the basis to reach a ubiquitous and mobile integration of the clinical environments withsupport for large scale connectivity from different physiological sensors, integration with informationsystems, and its homogeneous access through Internet and Web technologies from consumer devicessuch as tablets, smart phones, and laptops.

This paper has presented the contributions carried out to move from a conceptual IoT to a real onethrough the potential of IPv6 technology.

The communication architecture for the Internet of Things is composed of the key components toenable security, mobility, and end-to-end connectivity/reliability.

For the integration of everything, it needs to be considered all the rage of IoT technologies, such as6LoWPAN (IEEE 802.15.4), Bluetooth Low Energy (IEEE 802.15.1) and Near Field Communication(NFC).

These technologies require protocols such as GLoWBAL IPv6 and the IPv6 Addressing Proxy, forthe inclusion of all the resources and devices available in the IoT ecosystem to the common addressingspace from Internet (IPv6). Thereby, an Internet of everything can be reached.

In addition to the support of the addressing, IPv6 also offers the possibility to provide a scalablesecurity and mobility.

For this purpose, the protocols Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) for mobility, and IP Security (IPSec) for securityhave been defined, but both protocols have required a lightweight version of MIPv6 with support to IPSecin order to make it suitable for the IoT ecosystems.

In definitive, the conclusion is that smart phones, personal data terminals, and other mobile comput-ing devices are still far from what a future IoT will require to connect services, people, and things. But,full IPv6 integration is the first step towards this destination. As next steps one envisages support formobility, multi-homing, discovery techniques, and management solutions in order to make things moreautonomous and to enable a communications era based on the Future Internet of Things, Services andPeople, i.e., an Internet of Everything.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted during the PhD Thesis of Antonio J. Jara in the Intelligent Systems andNetworks group, of the University of Murcia, Espinardo, Spain, awarded for its excellence as a researchgroup in the frame of the Spanish “Plan de Ciencia y Tecnologıa de la Region de Murcia” from the“Fundacion Seneca” (04552/GERM/06). The authors would like to thank the European Project “Univer-sal Integration of the Internet of Things through an IPv6-based Service Oriented Architecture enablingheterogeneous components interoperability (IoT6)” from the FP7 with the grant agreement no: 288445,and the Spanish ministry, for education, social politics and sport, for sponsoring this research activitywith the grant FPU program (AP2009-3981).

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Antonio J. Jara is the Vice-chair of the IEEE Communications Society Internet ofThings Technical Committee, CTO and co-founder of the Smart Cities company vi-Brain Solutions, Assistant Prof. PostDoc at University of Applied Sciences WesternSwitzerland (HES-SO) from Switzerland, He did his PhD at the Intelligent Systemsand Telematics Research Group of the University of Murcia (UMU) from Spain. Hereceived two M.S. (Hons. - valedictorian) degrees. The first in Computer Sciencefrom UMU in 2009, where Master Thesis explored the “Internet of things in clinical

environments”, and a second M.S. Computer Science degree dealing with advanced networks and artifi-cial intelligence from UMU in 2010. Master Thesis pertained to Mobility protocols for 6LoWPAN. Hehas been associated with the Department of Information and Communication Engineering, UMU, since2007, where he has been working on several projects related to the WSNs (6LoWPAN and ZigBee) andRFID applications in building automation and healthcare. He is especially focused on the design anddevelopment of new protocols for security and mobility for Future Internet of things, which is the topicof my Ph.D. He has also carried out a Master in Business Administration (MBA). He has published over100 international papers, As well, he holds one patent, and he has participated in several Projects aboutthe Internet of Things.

Latif Ladid is the Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Internet of ThingsTechnical Committee. He holds the following positions: President, IPv6 FORUMwww.ipv6forum.org, Chair, European IPv6 Task Force www.eu.ipv6tf.org, EmeritusTrustee, Internet Society www.isoc.org, Board Member IPv6 Ready and Enabled Lo-gos Program and Board Member World Summit Award www.wsis-award.org. Heis a Senior Researcher at the University of Luxembourg Security and Trust (SnT)www.securityandtrust.lu on multiple European Commission Next Generation Tech-

nologies IST Projects. Latif is also a Member of 3GPP PCG (www.3gpp.org), 3GPP2 PCG (www.3gpp2.org),Vice Chair, IEEE ComSoc TCIIN , Member of UN Strategy Council, member of IEC Executive Com-mittee and member of the Future Internet Forum EU Member States, representing Luxembourg.

Antonio Skarmeta is the Vice-chair of the IEEE Communications Society Internetof Things Technical Committee. He received the M.S. degree in Computer Sciencefrom the University of Granada and B.S. (Hons.) and the Ph.D. degrees in ComputerScience from the University of Murcia Spain. Since 2009 he is Full Professor at thesame department and University. Antonio F. Gomez-Skarmeta has worked on dif-ferent research projects in the national and international area, like Euro6IX, 6Power,Positif, Seinit, Deserec, Enable, Daidalos, ITSS6, and IoT6. His main interested is

in the integration of security services at different layers like networking, management and web services.Associate editor of the IEEE SMC-Part B and reviewer of several international journals, he has publishedover 90 international papers and is member of several program committees.

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